


if you were alien, an intergalactic girl

by whendocloudssleep



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Doctor Who, Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-15
Updated: 2013-01-15
Packaged: 2017-11-25 14:45:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/639959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whendocloudssleep/pseuds/whendocloudssleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s cold and hard and doesn’t listen when people talk, but he’s so tired that when she says, “I’m Rory Gilmore,” when she tosses out the fake name that rolls like water off of her tongue, “and this is the TARDIS,” that he just nods and lets himself be shoved inside.</p><p>He looks around and is so curious that she can feel it rolling off of him in waves, but instead he just fingers the worn out book in his pocket and nods, says, “I’m Jess Mariano, but you knew that already.”</p><p>There’s distrust behind his eyes and she knows that he can see her lie, but she just grins and says, “How would you like to see everything?”</p><p>(And when he runs away, she doesn’t blame him, because even though it hurts everything inside of her it’s her turn to be the one left standing still.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you were alien, an intergalactic girl

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally a three sentence fic from a prompt on tumblr, but as with all Jess/Rory related feelings they grew until they exploded into this.

He finds a camera hidden in between books on the shelves in the library. It's old and disposable and it makes him wonder who else was here. It makes him wonder what the person who tucked this camera into this crack was thinking.

He slips silently through the TARDIS and into the control with silent steps picked up in a home where making noise wasn’t allowed. “Whose camera is this?”

Rory jumps and hits her head on the bottom side of the control panel. He’s still not sure that she actually knows what she’s doing. Jess is pretty sure that she is doing it so that her hands will be busy. He’s got plenty of ways that he could help with that, but since he isn’t sure what Rory’s thoughts on that would be Jess has decided against mentioning it.

He tosses it to her and flops onto the seat a few feet away from where she’s still resting on the floor. She looks at it for a moment before sniffing, and then finally licking the bottom side of it. He quickly flinches at that, before realizing that his diet back at home was probably just as appetizing as the camera. “I’m not sure. I think it was mine, but whose-ever it was didn’t get to take any pictures.”

“I noticed.” And before he can move or hide his face, she’s taking a picture of him. It leaves a spot in his vision, and he wonders why on Earth she would want a picture of him and his messy hair.

Jess doesn’t let it bother himself for long, because he quickly lunges forward and grabs the camera from Rory’s loose grip. He keeps moving and ends up a few feet away, also sitting on the glass floor of the TARDIS. It’s always warm through his jeans, unlike the worn wooden floors of the hallways.

He catches Rory as she’s mid-laugh, still wondering at what he’s doing. Her hair is messed up from where she hit it when he came in, and he thinks she’s more beautiful than any human that he’s ever seen and he’s seen a lot of beautiful people.

They end up chasing each other through the TARDIS and through an act of Jess’ quick reflexes the camera is barely saved from a watery death in the pool. Their clothes are not so lucky.

-

Now not only does he carry a book in his pocket, but he carries a disposable camera as well, and he’s sure that the pictures all turn out extremely touristy. He had never minded when people had done touristy things in New York, could never resent someone for feeling so out of their depths that they needed a camera to ground themselves but this doesn’t feel like that.

This feels like he’s standing on the shore and staring out at the waves that want to drag him under, but there’s this two-hearted woman that’s standing behind him and holding his hand, and that even though she looks so weak she can keep the waves from getting to them.

They take pictures and as time goes on he smiles more than he’s ever smiled before. He has a feeling that it’s not going to last and he’ll throw himself into an actual ocean before he lets her drown him.

-

She kisses him in a clearing on a planet that he doesn’t think he could pronounce. Everything is green, green, green, green, and he thinks that maybe he’s never going to be able to see green again after this, which would be fine with him. 

When she pulls away, she’s still got her fingers in his hair, and his are fisted in the blue fabric of her dress. It takes a moment for him to open his eyes, and when he does Rory’s are there right in front of him, the bluest blue ever, and she’d said that about the TARDIS once as they laid on separate couches and read different books, but still managed to carry on a conversation.

It hurts more than anything has ever hurt him before, when she pulls away and runs off. He thinks that maybe he should follow her, that he should say that it was okay, and that she didn’t do anything wrong, that he’s been in love with her for months now, but he isn’t good at saying words and she’s not good at hearing them.

Instead he takes the camera out of his pocket, and turns to snap a picture of himself. He’s sure that his hair is extra messy from her hands, that his lips have traces of her all over them, and when he glances behind him, he can still see the vivid blue of her dress against the vivid green around them.

-

She leaves him on the planet for two months. It takes him a day to give up on her and get himself a job. The only lucky thing that he’s ever had happen to him is that the TARDIS is still translating for him, because he doesn’t think that Rory, or the Doctor as people in some places take to calling her, would like that he went back to being a thief while she was gone.

That’s if she ever comes back, which he’s doubtful about.

He gets in good with the owner of the store that he works in, and they talk him into coming to stay at their home, trusting that a friend of The Doctor wouldn’t do anything to hurt them. It’s better than the tent that he’s been sleeping in the clearing where Rory left him so he agrees.

He helps with the cooking and cleaning and tries to pay rent and utilities. They shove all of the money back at him though, saying that since he has to start fresh that the least they can do is help him with this.

He buys a couple of shirts, and the jeans that he gets feel like they’ve already been worn in the way his old jeans feel. He gets a library card and volunteers there, whenever he’s not working. It’s not like he has a ton of people competing for his attention here.

-

Rory comes back on a cool morning when Jess is on his way home from getting a couple dozen Kalth peaches. He has a plum in his mouth, and it takes a bit of quick moving from the both of them to stop the plum and all of the peaches from going spilling into the street.

“Hi.” She says like she didn’t leave him stranded on Kalth-Maxetanieya months ago.

He’s never going to be able to refuse he anything though, because he says, “Hello” and pulls her out of the street with him when Mr. Axelto honks his horn at them.

Jess yells sorry, and when he looks back at Rory she’s taking a bite of his plum. “You lost all right to do that when you kissed me and then left me here for two months with no letter, no call, fruit basket, smoke signal. No anything.”

He grabs the plum back, and takes another bite, before starting to walk again. Ksherra will be wondering where he is with her peaches soon, and he’s not a fan of the purple that her skin turns when she’s angry. Kalth people look like humans other than the blue tint to their skin. Maxtaniens have a sunshine-y yellow skin tone.

Jess is mainly glad that the sky is still blue. He can handle everything else.

“What? Two months?” She sounds confused and it takes more control than he thought he has to keep walking. Jess has to think that Rory knows what she did. “Oh Jess, I’m so sorry. I was just going to be gone for a couple of hours. I shouldn’t have kissed you like that and I felt bad. I just needed to clear my head and I guess the TARDIS got the date wrong. I should never have left at all.”

He can feel himself forgiving her, and he doesn’t want to. He wants to get to be mad at her for just a bit longer, because she left him just like everyone else has always left him.

But she came back.

Rory grabs him, and wraps her arms around him. She’s crying and whispering that she’s sorry into the collar of his shirt, and Jess can feel himself giving in to being in love with and forgiving her.

-

It takes a few weeks for things to get back to normal once they’re back in the TARDIS, and after the months he had of everything being calm, Jess is glad that Rory seems to be finding trouble more often.

She’s drunk on the tea of some alien flower, and they’re lounging together in a prison cell that’s cleaner than a few of the apartments he grew up in, when she starts spilling secrets.

“I used to follow all of the rules. We weren’t supposed to interfere, but since I met you I can’t seem to go back to just watching bad things happen. Not when I could stop them.” She slides against the wall some so that she’s leaning with her shoulder pressed against his. “I’m glad about that.”

Jess can only smile a little about that and he’s glad that it’s dark.

-

Over the course of their night spent in jail, Rory tells him all about her last few regenerations and the fact that she doesn’t think that she’s ever been in love before, and he thinks that it might be a slip of her tongue but it makes him feel a bit more confident and happy all the same.

She grabs the camera from where it’s sitting on top of his book next to him, and they take a picture. Rory is cuddling into his chest and Jess is looking down at her, and not the camera and the flash is too bright even when he’s not looking at the little light bulb.

They get released in the morning when Rory sobers up and can explain that it wasn’t really their fault that the building got knocked down, and that she’s sure the company had official records but that the two of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She smiles up at him, and the two of them run off to the TARDIS with him grinning and her laughing like a fool.

-

The next time that the two of them kiss, Jess is the one that starts it.

They’re in the twenties and Rory’s got her hair pinned back and curled a bit and he’s in his leather jacket. The two of them are walking down streets that he knows like the back of his hand that feel so incredibly different. The sun it setting and it’s starting to get chilly and when he drapes his jacket across her shoulders he feels sure that they fit in.

He’s straightening it out so that it’s all of the way around her, and he finds that he can’t stop himself from grabbing the lapels of his own jacket and pulling her close to him.

It only takes a moment for her hands to come up to wrap around his neck, and he catches his jacket as it slides off of her shoulder, and pulls her closer. She tastes like the ice cream they were eating a little while earlier and the weight of his jacket is the only thing grounding him.

When they pull away, he has to be the one to speak, has to say something before she runs away again. “You weren’t wrong in kissing me before. You just- you weren’t wrong.”

He thinks that even though he’s no good with words, she understands because she pulls him in and kisses him again before dragging him away and shoving him into her bedroom the same way that she shoved him into the TARDIS so long ago.

-

For a moment Jess wonders if things are going to get awkward between them after that, but they don’t. Things are lovely and nice and there’s a lot more hand holding than there was before and he can kiss Rory any time he likes.

They curl up together and watch movies and read and kiss and kiss and things seem to be going wonderfully. The two of them still get into the little arguments that they got into before only now they end with kissing instead of silent longing and hiding away in his room.

They use up the rest of the film in the first camera and a second one. They get it developed and buy too much canned tea and ice cream and frozen food and junk food and things that they don’t need because while wasting time in Walgreens.

-

The next day they fight and it’s worse than ever before. Jess gets his things packed up and leaves the TARDIS without saying goodbye. He takes most of the photographs but can’t find the CDs that they had gotten made just in case and the picture that he’d taken of himself surrounded by all of that startling green with the small blue line in background is missing too.

-

He travels around the US for a while and sees things that he saw twenty, one-hundred, eighty years ago and writes in a red notebook, because red has always been his favorite color and Rory had been in a red dress when he had first kissed her.

When his first book gets published he dedicates it to Rory Gilmore and wishes that he could show her, and tell her that he misses her. Instead he writes a second book, a third, a fourth and moves to live in a French apartment.

-

It’s the middle of the night and there’s someone knocking on his door, and he thinks that he should be scared but he’s lived through worse things than this. He was stranded on another world and was shot in the side when he was seventeen years old. He can handle himself.

It’s the most surprising thing then, that it’s Rory on the other side of the door.

“You wrote me a book.” She throws it at him, a paperback edition of The Subsect, his first novel. He catches it and likes the feel of how worn it is. It makes him wonder how often she’s read it.

“I’ve written you four books.” He doesn’t say the so far, but he thinks that she can tell anyway, either from the look on his face or the word document open on his laptop behind him.

It doesn’t matter either way because she’s leaning forward to put her hands on his face and kiss him. His hands go to her hips and it’s like not a day has passed even though it’s been almost seven years. 

He pulls her inside and kicks the door shut and whispers all of his secrets into her skin.

-

The next morning he makes them breakfast and they walk around the city for a while, before she finally asks him, “Where do you want to go?”

He packed what he would need last night while she was asleep and after he answers, it doesn’t take them long to dive head first back into the stars.

“Everywhere.”


End file.
